The purpose of this paper is to explore how masculinity and femininity are constructed in the magazine Veckorevyn, through a critical discourse analysis of 18 articles from six issues in 2011. This is done by using a variety of theories and previous research results, which is gender theory, the theory of late-modern society and media theory. The analysis shows that Veckorevyn depicts virility and feminine differently. Furthermore, pointing the results from the analysis that a change of manhood and womanhood takes place in the social practice. The selection of articles from the magazine also shows that Veckorevyn seems to promote gender equality.

The thesis examines the contemporary Bengali practice of worshipping clay images. By clay is understood 'unbaked' clay. The thesis makes a distinction between 'baked clay' (terracotta) images and 'unbaked' clay (terracruda) images and examines the preference for worshipping terracruda images. The worship of clay images is examined within the context of image worship in general in India, referring to the classical iconographical canons and other texts in which clay is mentioned as a suitable medium for the making of religious icons. The study is restricted to the Hindu religion. The thesis does not restrict itself to a purely iconographical approach. The thesis discusses the artistic tradition that gave rise to the clay images of Bengal,as well as attempting to understand the religious significance of the images. In tracing the tradition, the author has used vernacular sources as well as early records of travellers. In describing the contemporary technique of clay image making, the author has relied on recorded interviews and photo-documentation taken during a three month period of fieldwork in West Bengal. The thesis establishes that there has been a tradition of worshipping clay images in Bengal that is at least two centuries old and suggests that there are earlier precedents for the tradition. It also concludes that it is a strongly regional tradition that developed in Bengal and influenced the neighbouring states of Bihar, Assam and Orissa. The worship of terracruda images in Bengal is a regional practice that is the product of both classical and 'folk' influences.

This dissertation reports on the results of a study into the characteristics of epistemic topoi and the methods of their identification in a corpus of biomedical publications. The study was conceived in response to the need for a systematized description of the organization of argumentative text and discourse. This need is well recognized in knowledge-intensive fields: information processing, storage, and retrieval; corpus analysis and natural language processing; data mining, knowledge management and translation; professional training and education. The study followed the design of a situated study combined with a methodological inquiry. I used inductive methods to describe the features and functions of recurrent patterns of argumentative and linguistic organization. This part of the study consisted in close reading of a corpus of fifty-five NTG papers and rhetorical and linguistic annotation of seventeen clinical studies (45,599 words) selected from the corpus. The data was generated by means of rhetorical and linguistic analysis. Visual annotation played an essential role in the identification and description of the argumentative patterns, complementing the traditional methods of corpus analysis. Forty-eight basic and nine composite epistemic topoi forming the superstructure of the papers were identified in the corpus. The topoi were found to be loosely associated with the IMRD structure and signalled with configurations of lexicogrammatical, semantic, deictic, and coreferential features. The topoi were classified according to the modes of reasoning and textual and discursive functions. The obtained results confirmed earlier insights into the links of linguistic patterning with text and discourse semantics. A significant outcome of the linguistic analysis is a catalogue of linguistic features that were found to have regular links with the topoi in the corpus. The role of linguistic configurations as identifiers of argumentative meanings makes them a valuable medium of text and discourse analysis. By linking the argumentative meanings to the surface features of text and discourse, the analysis of linguistic configurations presents informatics practitioners with an alternative to the current methods of natural language processing and knowledge management. The catalogue of linguistic features and a detailed description of the study design make the presented findings amenable to secondary analysis, extrapolation, and generalization. The auxiliary objectives of this study were a survey of argumentative practices represented in the corpus and a review of the state of epistemic research. The results of the survey and review suggest that agonistic reasoning practices and over-reliance on reductionist models have negative implications for research writing and communication. Specifically, they hamper analysis of argumentative organization of natural text and discourse. As an alternative to agonistic argumentation, I propose an argumentation model based on Aristotle’s and Kneale’s conceptions of situated knowledge and learning. The model of textual and discursive organization that accommodates situated knowledge and learning is political stasis. This model can be used as a heuristic and analytic tool. In this dissertation I use it as an explanatory conception and as a system of reference points for identifying significant research trends both in argumentation studies and in clinical NTG research.

School of Economics, Diss.--Helsinki, 2007. / Enth. 4 Beitr.

Norges Handelshøyskole, Diss.--Bergen, 2006. / Enth. 3 Beitr.

Handelshögskolan, Diss.--Göteborg, 2008. / Enth. 4 Beitr.

Univ., Diss. 2007--Lund, 2007. / Enth. 3 Beitr.

Handelshögskolan--Stockholm, 2007. / Enth. 3 Beitr.

Handelshøgskolen, Diss.--Bodø, 2006. / Enth. 4 Beitr.

Univ., Diss.--Aarhus, 2007. / Enth. 4 Beitr.